Enterprise software systems are typically sophisticated, large-scale systems that support many, e.g., hundreds or thousands, of concurrent users. Examples of enterprise software systems include financial planning systems, budget planning systems, order management systems, inventory management systems, sales force management systems, business intelligence tools, enterprise reporting tools, project and resource management systems, and other enterprise software systems.
Many enterprise performance management and business planning applications acquire data entered from a large base of users that the software then accumulates into higher-level areas of responsibility in the organization. Often these systems make use of multidimensional data sources that organize and manipulate the large volume of data using data structures referred to as data cubes. A data cube may, for example, include a plurality of hierarchical dimensions having levels and members for storing the multidimensional data. Once data has been entered, a user may wish to view some or all of the data in a coherent manner by generating a report. The system may perform mathematical calculations on the data and combine data submitted by many users. Using the results of these calculations, the system may generate reports for review.
The use of reporting and analysis end-user products (typically referred to as Business Intelligence, or BI, tools) allows users to author reports and perform data exploration and analysis on a myriad of data sources, such as multidimensional data structures, relational databases, flat files, Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) data, data streams, and unorganized text and data. Business intelligence tools may be used to prepare and aggregate individual reports and analyses by executing queries on underlying data sources and to present those reports and analyses in a user-accessible format.